PST Part 1

So I realize that I'm a little late on my first official Blog in Azerbaijan, but here it goes.  For the first three months I am here I will be in Pre-Service-Training (PST).  This is where we learn the language and train on teaching in an Azerbaijani classroom.  After this we get assigned to a town or village where we will be for the next two years of our service. Currently I am more than half way through PST. I am going to start from the beginning of the trip to try to give everyone some details about my experience so far.
September 20th I arrived to Washington DC. after a long morning of crying with my friends and family as I left Ohio.


I quickly figured out who my good friends would become after spending the night hanging out with other volunteers in Washington.  Its actually pretty funny because this group is still the group I tend to hangout with during training.


The next day we began our journey to Azerbaijan. The two flights total were about 12 hours. I actually managed to sleep most of the fligh, so it wasn't bad for me.  We arrived in Azerbaijan on September 22nd to an awesome group of AZ9 (the volunteer group that came one year before us- we are AZ10s) .  Here is a picture of them cheering us on as we walk in.  Rachel will probably kill me if she sees this picture.

Then lets see from here we went to a hotel for a few days for orientation.  On September 25th we left to move in with our host families.   I have an absolutely amazing host family.  Two brothers Sanan and Ruslan.  Sanan is married to my beautiful host sister-in-law Shabnam. They have two children
 Kanan (who is 1 1/2) and Laman (who is 6 months old).  Sharafat my host mother is on a mission to get me fat but it is only because she loves me.  Vali, my host father,  is a retired police officer who is always helping me with my Azerbaijani.  My house is always crazy but I absolutely love it.

Here are some pictures of Sumqayit, where I live.


 
Right now I am in week 8 of training.  My Language Instructor (LCF) is Ulker.  She is super patient and a great teacher.  It's funny because we will walk down the street all the time and people will think we are sisters (apparently I look Azerbaijani). This is a picture of my cluster (language class).

Starting from the left- John Ulker Me Holly and Cherril

Throughout our time here we have done lots of cool things. Here are some pictures of our trips so far.
In week 4 we all went to Gobustan which the site of a lot of cool hieroglyphics dating back between 5,000 - 40,000 years.  





On week  5 and 7 I had practicums where I had my first taste of teaching in an Azerbaijani classroom.  Let me tell you the first class was absolutely the worse class I could have ever taught.  It was 30+ kids who were equivalent to the age of a freshman in high school.  They were out of hand and the teacher did nothing to help me manage the class. Looking back I wouldn't trade it for anything, because I learned a ton of classroom management skills from that first week of teaching.

 My second week of teaching was amazing. By this time I knew a lot of the kid's personalities and they all knew me.  I absolutely loved every class they were so excited about doing new activities and especially playing games.  The last practicum made me so excited to have my own school and to be able to get to know my students.  Azerbaijani children are so excited to learn and have great personalities once you get to know them.

On week 6 all of the TEFLs got to go to Baku.  We had such a blast.  Our group is so much fun :-)  Here are some pictures.









This is the beginning of week 8 and I am actually only 4 days away from finding out what site I will be in for the next two years.  For those of you who don't know this is the cities in Azerbaijan.  I will either be in a village (very likely because I am a TEFL volunteer) or a town.


I am super excited and nervous at the same time to find out where I am going.  I know it is a little silly but I really would love to be close to one of my friends for my site placement. But, I know I will love where ever I am :-).  I just want it to be Thursday already so I can find out where I am going.

Some more fun stuff that we have done in Sumqayit during training include:
-Diner at Georgian restaurant
-Beach clean up

- guesting at other families houses

- football

- story time in Azerbaijani

-fun bus rides


Well I think that's all of the updates I have for now.  Expect much more to come in the following week :-)

Much love,

Chelsey